When I was four years old, my father was a professor at UCLA on sabbatical in France teaching at the University of Toulouse. So my family lived in a small village just outside of Toulouse for a year. It was magical. The only problem was that I was so afraid of losing my balance on the ceramic footholds on each side of the holes that were used for toilets in kindergarten, that my mom had to send me to school every single day with a change of underwear because I always peed in my pants rather than risk falling into the latrine. My mom had a huge belly that year, but I didn’t really understand what it was about. One particularly cold Saturday morning as we were getting [...]

When I first decided to write my book back in the Stone Ages, the internet had yet to take over our lives. So at that time, the thing that kept me up nights was my concern that women could misunderstand concepts in the book, leading to either unplanned pregnancies, or not conceiving when desperately wanting to. Today, those fears seem almost naïve compared to a much bigger concern: the pervasiveness of scores of Fertility Awareness apps that claim to be able to predict a woman’s fertility based on nothing more than inputting the first day of a period, or occasionally basal temperatures. In fact, the internet is flooded with these beautifully designed apps with gorgeous colors devised to monitor a woman’s menstrual cycle. But beware! Those data alone are [...]